World of Apple

Apple is about to begin its Special Event in Cupertino, World of Apple will place live updates in this post, so keep refreshing (descending).

• Steve is on stage.
• Jobs: The market share of the Mac is rising three times faster than the rest of the PC industry
• “Today’s focus is on the iMac”
• “iMacs have been very successful, and we’d like to make it even better,” he said. Apple is borrowing two elements from its pro products for this new generation of iMac — aluminum and silicon dioxide, better known as glass.
  
• “This is the new iMac design, and it’s just designing. This is the new iMac. Just gorgeous. You can see we have a full complement of I/O across the bottom. USB 2.0, Firewire 400, Fireiwre 800. Slot load superdrive. iSight camera and microphone. Can add memory with just one screw. New iMac will come in two sizes: 20-inch display, and 24-inch display. Both will be glossy. Customers say they love glossy displays.”
• New iMac. Also, new keyboard. You might have seen this on the web. Two USB ports. 0.33″, full complement of keys, including dedicated keys for screen dimmer and brighter, expose, media controls, volume controls, eject for optical drive. This is the new iMac with the new keyboard and mouse. Wireless? New wireless keyboard, beautiful, very compact. People love to hold them in their lap. Bluetooth 2.0, all these dedicated keys as well.”
• “What about the inside? Up to 2.4GHz Core 2 Extreme processor, up to 4GB of memory. ATI Radeon HD graphics card, up to 1TB of hard drive storage. 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.0 built-in. What models will we have? Up until now, 17-inch, 20-inch, and 24-inch. Well, today we’re replacing the 24-inch, lowering price by $200, 20-inch at same $1499. replacing 17-inch with $1199 model.”
• All models shipping Today.
• New advert to advertise the iMacs, shows iMacs rotating.
• Jobs shows picture of Mac lineup, Mac mini still there
• “Alright, next thing is applications that run on the Mac. Apple invented category of digital lifestyle applications. Computer is the hub of digital life. We’ve increased our lead over the PC industry. Introducing iLife ‘08. Totally new, biggest jump since we introduced it. iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb, iDVD and GarageBand. We’re replacing one of the apps with something that takes it to a new level.”
• “iPhoto. We’re adding “Events”. Digital cameras have made it so easy and inexpensive, photo libraries have grown, not unusual to find photo library with 5 or 6 thousand photos. It’s getting hard to find ‘em. We make albums, go to some event, take photos, and look what’s happened. We have tons of albums. They’re centered around events. Birthday party, family reunion. We label the albums. We have a computer, we could do this automatically. Automatically makes events out of your photos. Around 50 photos per avg per event. What that means is, instead of looking through 5K, you’re just looking through 100 events. Makes photos manageable again. What photos go in an event? When it automatically makes an event, what does it do? All photos taken in a day. All photos yesterday, put in an event. photos taken two days ago in an event, and so on. What happens if I go to a b-day party in the morning and wedding in the afternoon? Just pick first photo and splits automatically into two events. Multi-day events can be joined together into single event.”
• iPhoto also gains new editing tools, including the ability to copy and paste adjustments you’ve made on one photo to other photos where it makes sense. Books and calendars have been improved, theme based home printing is now available and more. Jobs demonstrated the new features and held up a book example, which can now be printed with foil lettering.
• “When you get your hands on this, you’ll think it’s great. We’re all familiar with .Mac. It’s our internet subscription service. We’re pleased to announce we have over 1.7M .Mac subscribers, we’re going to see it grow even faster after today. Marry .Mac and iPhoto. Announcing .Mac Web Gallery. Works hand in glove with iPhoto ‘08. What does it do? Has one button photo sharing. integrated into iPhoto ‘08. Makes web gallery, uploads automatically. Users get rich Web 2.0 experience. You can see photos in gallary, mosaic. can see in any browser you’d like. Now people that view photos, if you let them, can download print quality downloads. Users can contribute photos from anywhere. You publish on .Mac, someone is on a PC, there is special email address they can get from the web gallery, and they will appear on your web gallery. Photos will sync to your iPhoto library, too.
• we’ve added “Send to Web Gallery” on your iPhone. Pick one, emails to special address, that photo will show up on your web gallery. Can tell friends about it, View others’ web galleries right on your iPhone, great iPhone experience, fully integrated.”
• “Now I want to show how easy it is for other people to contribute to my .Mac web gallery. Phil Schiller has his iPhone, has snapped a photo, gonna send to my gallery right from his iPhone. Went right into my .Mac web gallery. Will auto download to my iPhone as well. Going back to my gallery. So that is .Mac Web Gallery.”
• “Next up: iMovie. This is really interesting. Let me tell you the story. One of our video engineers went to the Cayman Islands, shot a lot of underwater HD, wanted to make a video for his buddies in half an hour. We found out he couldn’t do it. Engineer got out Final Cut Pro. Couldn’t do it. Couldn’t do great movie in 30 minutes. So he created an app that could do it. We were so blown away that we decided to use it. We’re still calling it iMovie, but we’re giving a new icon so we can show it’s a whole new app. One library for all your video.”
• Support for AVCHD
• Like iPhoto, iMovie utilizes the “skimming” concept — you can use your mouse to skim through video, and don’t have to actually “play” clips to see what they contain. You can scrub, for example. “This allows you to have superfast movie creation,”
• Can view and share almost anywhere. You can go to share menu, make version for iTunes. Watch on computer, iPod, iPhone, Apple TV. Put on .Mac Web Gallery.”
• Also built-in YouTube sharing
• [Phone rings in audience! Jobs: “You might want to answer that”]
• Demoing iMovie, making a video real quick, looks good
• “We’re slinging around HD video we’ve taken. You can imagine making a movie in 20 minutes. It’s very well thought through. Can share it, pick resolutions that I want. One of things I want to show you is .Mac Web Gallery. put a few movies on there. You can see, it’s higher res than a DVD, anyone can see this. This is the movie our video engineered made. You can make it in 20 minutes and put it on the web. This is a much better and much faster way to do it. There’s a mobile resolution for watching on your iPhone. If you want, people can download to their own computer as well.”
• “So now I’d like to talk about iWeb. Enhanced version of iWeb, make even better websites. Live web widgets. Add GoogleMaps, we’ve made it so you can put it right in. You can add any web snippet, paste it into your website. Live web widgets. Another thing you can add is Google AdSense. Register with Google, type in registration, decide what format, Google will put ads in there that are appropriate. Media index page. A lot of us have sites with photos on them, we’d like index page. We’ve added that, you can create index page, add your content in. Page with all the photos. Taking up just one position in the navigation. Put pointers to .Mac page as well. Personal domain support. If you have a personal domain, that’s now supported. Themes, you can change theme now if you like. We’ve shipped some great themes. This is iWeb in iLife ‘08″
• iDVD’08 includes pro encoding codes, and 10 new themes
• “GarageBand, multi-take recording. Magic GarageBand, way to experiment, best way to communicate is just to show you. Let me show you.” Demo time! “Magic GarageBand gives me genres to play with: blues, rock, jazz, country, reggae, funk, latin, another rock style, and slow blues. I’m going to audition latin. Gives me little jazz club with my instruments.” Looks like you can switch instruments playing each part of the preloaded track. Changing violin to trumpet, removing the drums. “When I’ve got something I like, can add my own voice and instruments, loops, change around however I want to. Way for musicians and non-musicians alike to get into GarageBand. That’s GarageBand.
• That’s iLife ‘08, shipping today for $79 and free with all news Macs
• .Mac now with 10GB of storage as well as web galleries, new data transfer limit of 100GB
• iWork: Keynote and Pages. I’m very pleased to announce we’ve sold 1.8M copies to date. New iWork ‘08. New Keynote, new text effects, new transitions, Instant Alpha. Instant Alpha, get a photo, lets us take out the background, just keep part of photo you want. Smart Builds, lets anyone make very high production value animations. Go to Media Viewer, drag photos in, anything you want. Keynote generates animations for you. A to B animations, you can create your own animations. Easily build slides that mere mortals can figure out to use. Great new themes that are really beautiful. Of course you can add animations to these. These are so easy, so easy to make slides that look this good. So, these are just some of the features as part of Keynote ‘08.”
• Pages now has two modes, one designed for word processing and the other for page layout
• 140 built-in Apple designed templates
• New spreadsheet application called Numbers
• A spreadsheet “done in the style of Keynote and Pages”
• Numbers touts features like “intelligent tables,” which enable you to sort and filter by clicking on headers; “flexible canvas,” which lets you put multiple sheets on a canvas, tied together in formulas but not tied together by formatting. And it has the requisite set of features like chart creation, image management, text labels, the ability to add photos and diagrams, and so on.
• Ability to import and export almost any Excel document
• That iWork ‘08, costs $79. All application work in Tiger and will work in Leopard
• Starting a question and answer session
• Apple COO, Tim Cook now on stage as well as Phil Schiller
• “How well will you market this ecosystem to consumers, and show how seamlessly all this stuff works together?”

  Steve: “We’ve got a phenomenal customer base, they show their friends and their friends get jealous.”

  “Why are you not participating in Intel Inside program and not putting stickers on your Macs?”

  Steve: “What can I say? We like our own stickers better. Don’t get me wrong, we love Intel, combined with our OS, we’ve really tuned them well together. Everyone knows we use Intel processors, we’d rather tell them about the product inside the box.”

  Phil: “Too much stuff on PC box, stickers on laptop, trialware, You don’t have to peel stuff off.”

  “How thin are the iMacs?”

  Steve: “Really thin. You’ll get your hands on it in a minute, but they’re appreciably thinner.”

  “Two thirds of your products on mobile side, where do things go on the Mac side.”

  Steve: “Desktops still an important part. Don’t require miniaturization of notebook, can offer bigger keyboards, screens, lower cost. Some consumers will want to own both. We think iMac has bright future ahead of it.”

  “Didn’t mention Mac mini today, how is it doing?”

  Tim: “We’re refreshing the Mac mini today.”

  “Mentioned AdSense, what’s the relationship between Apple and Google?”

  Steve: “We are working closer with Google, they offer back end services we want to tie into our offerings. Google likes our products, too.”

  Looking at what you’ve done with the iPhone, there’s volatility in the stock. How satisfied that the product is on track?”

  Steve: “We think the iPhone is a pretty strong success, we think most of the world sees it that way too. We’re really happy with how it’s going.”

  “How is Apple TV today? How does it fit into Mac?”

  Steve: “We’re here to talk about Mac, we’ll have some news for the Apple TV soon, but nothing to talk about today.”

  “What about AMD chips?”

  Steve: “We use Intel chips”

  “What about the iMac in business?”

  Tim: “We’re seeing a lot of growth in business use. Mac is growing and a lot of that is business.”

  Steve: “A lot of other apps that run on the Mac, MSFT Office. But don’t discount that more and more of business is communication, so lots of people have to sell internally, and they’re excited about the tools we’re offering. We see the iMac having some traction in business.”

  “With someone editing movies and going to publish, why not support HD uploads?”

  Steve: “We do. Turns out that HD camcorders don’t have sensors that are full HD, so they produce images that are slightly lower than HD, but are still stellar. We use that res, which is close, but not quite HD. Best you can do under $10k

  “Introduced multitouch on iPhone, what about for the Mac?”

  Steve: “Makes sense for the iPhone, not sure it makes sense in the Mac. Classify that as a research project.”

  “There has been a suggestion that Apple appeals to smaller elite than mass customer base. Is it your goal to overtake PC in marketshare?”

  Steve: “Goal is to make the best PC in the world, and make something we can recommend to family in friends. There is some stuff in our industry we wouldn’t be proud to ship. We can’t ship junk. Thresholds we just can’t cross. But we want to make the best personal computers in the industry. Our products are usually not premium priced. Price our competitors’ computers, and add in all the extras, we’re competitive. We don’t offer stripped down products. We compare favorably. Thank you very much for coming today.”

• All done.